The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960
Page 18
It had taken George Bird Grinnell a full nineteen years to see Glacier National Park become a reality. But Sheldon, who always believed luck was on his side, was determined to obtain the designation within a decade. Recognizing that securing congressional approval was tough sledding, Sheldon began intensely lobbying the heavyset James Wickersham, the Alaska territory’s only delegate on Capitol Hill, a quasi-Rooseveltian conservationist. Wickersham, a pioneer judge originally from Illinois, was Alaska’s voice in Washington, D.C., from 1909 to 1921. He favored both the Alaska Railroad from Seward to Fairbanks and the establishment of Mount McKinley National Park.45 Working alongside Sheldon in lobbying were Nelson, Grinnell, and the Camp Fire Club of America. Together they vowed to have Congress vote in favor of the national park within the decade. One crucial fact was that the Alaska Railroad was being built from the southern coast of Alaska to Fairbanks. Tracks were being laid across Broad Pass, so the eastern limit of Mount McKinley National Park would be accessible by train, a plus for tourists wanting an excursion from Anchorage.46 Wickersham thought Mount McKinley would make an ideal railroad stopover. He imagined a getaway village, built around a string of hotels, which would attract tourists from all over the world.
Something about Sheldon’s fervor for protecting Alaska’s wildlife heritage was very appealing in the age of Model T’s, telephone wires, catchpenny devices, skyscrapers, soap bubbles, and the Wright brothers. What could be more American than a huge brown bear feeding on salmon in a fast-moving stream or a bull moose bedding down under a pine?
At meetings of the Boone and Crockett Club, Sheldon planned with friends exactly how to create a vast national park reserve the size of his home state, Vermont—a park to be run by the U.S. Department of the Interior. They got Stephen Mather, the director of the National Park Service, to sign on, with huge enthusiasm. As an inducement, Sheldon would talk about Denali as the last frontier. The 1909 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language had an interesting definition of frontier: “the border or advance region of settlement and civilization, as, the Alaskan frontier, chiefly U.S.”47
The historian Richard Slotkin, in The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier, 1776–1890, described the concept of the “frontier” as the “longest lived of American myths” and a “powerful continuing presence.”48 The Denali wilderness would now be the frontier. The national park would encompass broad river valleys, wildflower tundra, massive glaciers, and a portion of the lofty Alaska Range, including the unsurpassed Mount McKinley, North America’s highest summit. While many people celebrated the defeat of wilderness as progress on the march, Sheldon saw it as a loss of something essential to democracy. Sheldon realized that conservation had too many misleading labels. A crusade to eradicate bark beetles wasn’t Sheldon’s idea of either Muirian or Rooseveltian conservationism. To Sheldon the heart of conservation was saving wild landscapes. He saw himself, in the end, as a pioneering advocate of wilderness reserves, building on the legacy of TR’s federal bird reservations. Conservation was a term of compromise whereas wilderness was preservation at its purest.
In 1912, the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons brought out Sheldon’s memoir The Wilderness of the North Pacific Coast Islands: A Hunter’s Experiences While Searching for Wapiti, Bears, and Caribou on the Larger Coast Islands of British Columbia and Alaska. In it, Sheldon wrote about Admiralty Island, particularly the brown bear populations, in biological terms. There are beautifully written anecdotes about brown bears digging up wild parsnips, stalking prey, and fleeing after whiffing the scent of man. There was nothing purposefully sentimental about Sheldon’s encounters with bears, which included measuring the size of tapeworms in their dung. “It is a wonderful sight to see the huge bear suddenly appear on the bank of a creek swiftly flowing through the great forest, while the salmon fight and splash and the gulls scream in the plaintive voices as they hover about the pools,” Sheldon wrote. “To see a bear leap into the rapids, sweep out a salmon with its paw, and return silently into the wood to make its feast must be a stirring experience and one that would give a wonderful glimpse of wildlife in the forest of the wilderness. It is, however, a field for the photographer, not the sportsman.”49
Sheldon did a convincing job of presenting the Denali area to the Department of the Interior as a teeming and impressive land. Helping the lobbying, and arriving at just the right time, was a memoir by the mountaineer Belmore Browne, The Conquest of Mount McKinley (1913), complete with anecdotes about mushing behind a team of dogs over high mountain passes.50 Ever since the nomadic Yupik and Inupiat brought dogsleds from Siberia to Alaska, mushing had become a preferred and practical mode of transportation across the wilderness territory. Declawed, their incisors pulled, sometimes even castrated, Eskimo dogs (or malamutes) had an inbred sense of direction and made winter travel feasible in Alaska. Arctic explorers such as Leopold McClintock and Fridtjof Nansen had popularized these dogs in their adventure sagas. Jack London transformed them into symbols of the far north in The Call of the Wild. In 1908 Nome inaugurated the All-Alaskan Sweepstakes, a sporting event that eventually led to the Iditarod race. And now Browne, in The Conquest of Mount McKinley, presented these dogs as heroic mountain climbers, thus helping Sheldon’s proposed national park get extra newspaper coverage in the Atlantic coast states.
Browne’s unanticipated assistance convinced Sheldon of a political truth: if you stuck to your guns long enough in America, right would eventually prevail. Sensing an opportune moment, Sheldon wrote to Nelson at the Biological Survey that the time had come to push the legislation for Denali National Park through Congress—the letter was dated October 10, 1915.51 This document was the opening salvo of a fierce legislative tussle. Sheldon’s journals about Denali, in fact, were now carefully studied by U.S. congressmen as clear-eyed dispatches from “The roof of the continent.” Every page, it was quickly understood, constituted a first-rate argument for the wilderness and wildlife preservation rather than logging in the Denali region.
V
Sheldon finally achieved his goal in 1917. After a flurry of last-minute negotiations about railroad entry and hunting laws, and after crucial lobbying by the Boone and Crockett Club and the Camp Fire Club of America, Congress presented Sheldon with an approved bill. Immediately, document in hand, Sheldon hurried to the White House, hoping to speed up the signing process. On February 26, President Wilson at last approved the legislation to create Mount McKinley National Park. He invited the jubilant Sheldon to attend the official signing ceremony at the White House. Sheldon’s arduous treks across the Alaska Range over glaring snowfields in icy gales, counting caribou and Dall sheep, had paid off for America and the world. The U.S. government had finally recognized his vision of Mount McKinley—and the beautiful raw-bone foothills of the Alaska Range—as belonging to every citizen. Laws associated with the new national park complemented Sheldon’s vision: no market hunters, no gold prospectors, and no oil-field geologists would be allowed in the 2 million-acre wilderness.
But there were some problems. For one thing, Congress rejected the name Denali in favor of Mount McKinley National Park. Sheldon and others were annoyed. Congress also refused to appropriate new money to protect Mount McKinley from the poaching of wildlife and timber. All President Wilson and Congress had really agreed to was a template for protection. With no funds set aside for the long-term preservation of Mount McKinley, Sheldon knew, the Denali wilderness wouldn’t last long. Conservationist activism was a constant experience of tribulations. Disappointed, Sheldon tapped the Boone and Crockett Club for $8,000 so that the Department of the Interior could hire a superintendent for Mount McKinley.52
Because of Sheldon’s public promotion of Mount McKinley, tourists started trickling in—very slowly—to see it. Only seven visitors came to see the new national park in 1922.53 In 1923 the Curry Hotel opened in time for the park’s formal dedication. A scenic viewpoint—the “Regal Vista”—was established so that tourists could snap ph
otographs of McKinley without an arduous hike.54
The only newspaper that seemed to care about the new national park was the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Not until 1924, when roads and concessions were built, did the number of visitors increase. Stephen Mather lobbied aggressively for congressional allocations to help the park develop infrastructure. A log structure (looking rather like a strip mall) became the tourist gateway of McKinley Station; it comprised a roadhouse, a general store, a post office, a public garden, and little log motel cabins to rent. The Alaska Railroad, working closely with the National Park Service, printed up attractive brochures and extolled the run from Seward to Fairbanks as the “Mount McKinley Route.”55 As the historian Alfred Runte noted in National Parks: The American Experience, the new park met the major preservationist criterion of the era: “monumentalism.”56
Sheldon also achieved, like Muir before him at Glacier Bay, the promotion of discovery and recreation in Alaska for tourists of tomorrow. A later cult of wilderness enthusiasts wanted to explore Alaska’s boundless forests and glaciers. Colonel A. J. “Sandy” Macnab and Frederick K. Vreeland—of the Camp Fire Club of America—represented the new breed of outdoors enthusiasts, eager to make a permanent mark as conservationists in Alaska. After World War I, Americans, aglow with victory, discovered Alaskan mountains and rivers as a leisure-time destination. Aviation now made “doing Alaska” feasible for rich people from the East Coast. Colonel Macnab, who served under General Pershing in France, had supervised a rifle school there, outside Le Mans. Under his leadership more than 200,000 U.S. soldiers a week learned how to use a Springfield .30-06 rifle. After the war Macnab, based in Camp Benning, Georgia, dreamed of Lake Clark, Alaska—where the Dall sheep, caribou, and bears reportedly were abundant. Vreeland—an electrical engineer, photographer, and wilderness enthusiast based in New York—had a different motivation. He wanted to photograph the region and test his survival skills.
Macnab and Vreeland, as noted above, were both members of the Camp Fire Club of America (CFCA), which had been started in 1897 by the zoologist Hornaday. The club’s name sounded rather bland (as if it were for aging Boy Scouts who wanted to toast marshmallows); but in truth, its elite membership consisted of approximately 100 physically fit survivalists and wilderness devotees. (Later, its membership increased to about 480, and many members came from the Westchester County area.) Deeply secretive about their club’s history—it was a kind of Skull and Bones for outdoors endurance—the members often climbed the highest peaks, went down category 4 or 5 white-water rapids in kayaks, and tested themselves against hurricanes, blizzards, avalanches, and torrential rains.57 In his book The Forest (1903), Stewart Edward White described the CFCA as brave men of “essential pluck and resourcefulness pitting themselves against the forces of nature.”58 Perseverance, toughness, ardor—every club member was a Theodore Roosevelt or a Charles Sheldon in the making.
It wasn’t until 1910 that the CFCA became an active group for the protection of wildlife habitats in America. Wisely, under the leadership of Ernest Thompson Seton, the club purchased two heavily wooded farms in Westchester County as a retreat—the total area was 161 acres.59 There were two lakes on the property. More land was added in 1917. The main lodge was built from local cedar logs. (Boy Scouts of America was founded on its porch.) No electricity was allowed, but gas lamps were permitted. Pistol shooting was encouraged on the range. Every spring the club had outdoor outings. To be a member, an applicant had to feel claustrophobic about big-city life—and pass twenty-one survival tests.60
One afternoon at the CFCA compound Macnab and Vreeland launched a plan to hike all around the Lake Clark–Iliamna area of southwestern Alaska; it would be, in their estimate, the next Mount McKinley (or Denali). There was a paucity of maps of the Lake Clark area in the 1910s. The whole mountainous area was a jumble of unnamed streams and lakes essential to Bristol Bay (the preeminent salmon fishery in the world) and Cook Inlet (the shipping route to Anchorage). What Macnab and Vreeland understood was that Lake Clark was the big-hearted country of Alaska. If that sounded like balderdash, consider this geographic fact: Lake Clark was the junction of Alaska’s three great mountain ranges: the Alaska Range (from the north), the Aleutian Range (from the south), and the region’s own Chigmit Mountains. There were two active volcanoes soaring over Cook Inlet—Iliamna (10,018 feet) and Redoubt (10,197 feet)—within the lands considered worthy of becoming a preserve. Going straight west, across a vast stretch of tundra, brought a traveler to Roosevelt’s Yukon Delta Federal Bird Reservation. “Glorious views of Kachemak Bay,” Muir had written of the area east of Lake Clark in his journal for 1899, “many glaciers; bright weather. Fine views of Iliamna, Redoubt, and other volcanoes, the former smoking and steaming distinctly at times; surrounded by sharp lower peaks and peaklets—the most beautiful, icy, and interesting of all the mountains of the Alaska Penin- sula.”61
Seeing the sky-piercing volcanoes around Lake Clark from the luxury of Harriman’s yacht, however, was far different from hiking near their lava base snapping photographs, as Macnab and Vreeland aimed to do. Traversing miles of moss and muskeg, with swarms of hard-biting flies as companions, and camping among the swamp willows and alders was no picnic. The Lake Clark plateau resembled the Arctic terrain, with caribou herds wandering the permafrost tundra. It was hard going for even a nature photographer like Vreeland (after whom a Canadian glacier had been named) and a crack marksman like Macnab (who was just back from the Great War). Besides a few Euroamericans, the main populations around Lake Clark were the Dena’ina Athabascans (on Iliamna) and the Yupik Aleuts (at the mouth of the Newhalen River and the southwest portion of Iliamna Lake). These tribes were good stewards of the land. But as industrialization increased—with overpopulation becoming a new plague—Lake Clark was bound to attract the extraction industries.
There was about Vreeland a touch of the naturalist Muir. Vreeland had written a number of excellent articles in Field and Stream about the preservation of nature in New England. His “Passing of the Maine Wilderness,” in the April 1912 issue, was credited with saving Mount Katahdin (the favorite peak of Thoreau and, later, Roosevelt) from clear-cutting. Although Vreeland failed to get the North Woods of Maine designated as a national park, his indefatigable advocacy led to the creation of Baxter State Park (the fourth largest in America).62 The sacred Appalachian wilderness where Thoreau had written The Maine Woods, published posthumously in 1909, was secured.
A few years later, in May 1916, Vreeland testified before the House Subcommittee on Public Lands for the establishment of Mount McKinley National Park. An excellent skier and a leader in the Boy Scout movement, Vreeland lectured about the need for American wildlife and for gorgeous wilderness landscapes like Denali to be handed down to future generations to enjoy. Along with Stephen Mather (National Park Service) and Robert Marshall (U.S. Forest Service), Vreeland was the most effective conservationist to testify that afternoon on Capitol Hill. Passionately defending Sheldon’s field research on the Denali wilderness, Vreeland helped convince U.S. congressmen that Mount McKinley was irreplaceable.63
Vreeland—in his forties, always meticulously dressed with not a wrinkle in his clothes—considered himself more of a “camera naturalist” than a hunter or an angler. Growing up, he had hunted in Maine and Quebec. Like Hornaday, however, he recoiled from trophy hunting as he matured. One of his closest friends was Daniel Beard, a founder of the Boy Scouts of America; they frequently challenged each other in learning all the birds and trees of the Adirondacks. After graduating from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1895 and Columbia University in 1909, Vreeland made a fortune inventing and patenting dozens of electrical devices, including the sine-wave oscillator, a radio band selector, and the Vreeland spectroscope. He earned further renown for photographing the grizzlies of Yellowstone in their lairs. Roosevelt considered him the best wildlife photographer around, the best landscape and portrait photographer being Edward Curtis. An expert cartographer, Vreeland also mapped the mou
ntains between the Peace and Fraser rivers in British Columbia and Alberta. In 1915 Vreeland Glacier was named in his honor by the Canadian government.64
Macnab and Vreeland shared at least two ideas: the CFCA’s belief that wilderness defined the American character; and the certainty that market hunting, overfishing, and poaching were reprehensible acts of debauched scoundrels. Committed to the outdoors life, they saw the Lake Clark region along Cook Inlet as a first-rate locale where hardy sportsmen of the CFCA could go in the summer to camp, hike, run rivers, fish, and maybe shoot a few ducks for dinner. The real Alaskan fishermen—both Euro-American and Native Alaskans—were good marine stewards of nearby places like Bristol Bay, Kachemak Bay, and the Shelikof Strait. The CFCA thought the resident fisherman should have a self-imposed limit of two to five halibut a day. And any fish over 100 pounds, unless they were trying to win a contest, had to be released; it was obviously a female full of eggs. So the fishermen of Homer, reels down, would bring the halibut and salmon to the dock, clean up, and go home. Fair fishing made sense to most of them. But the CFCA rejected the Seattle and San Francisco fishing companies that depleted the salmon waters around Bristol Bay for a single season’s profits. Such “fake fishermen” were bad actors, anticonservationists, greedy money-grubbers. It was an uphill battle because Alaskan politicians cared only about lining their own pockets with fast money.